Each of these companies is widely misread. Select one to see the mistaken assumption, the asset actually being built, and where the money moves.
Loyalty points are a privately minted currency. Banks, retailers and hotels buy that currency in bulk to hand to their own customers.
The Guide runs at a loss by design. What it builds is the credibility that makes a Michelin star meaningful, and that credibility transfers to the tyre.
Gore sets the certification process and the testing regime. Only approved manufacturers earn the tag, and the tag is what consumers look for before the brand.
Every dollar of Stripe revenue represents roughly $280 in merchant sales flowing through its rails. Depth of integration is the moat.
Every negotiated permission generates a tested condition. Every compliance record generates a trust signal. Accumulated across three countries, those records produce a defensible standard for how a good permission decision is made.
The same three-step move in every case. An activity happens. The activity leaves something durable behind. The durable thing is what people pay for.
Asset: a private currency, created through the loyalty record. Revenue: banks buy miles in bulk, whatever the flight margin.
Asset: epistemic authority, built through independent inspection. Revenue: tyre sales globally, lifted by the trust the Guide earns.
Asset: a trusted standard, held through controlled approval. Revenue: licensing fees from manufacturers who want the tag.
Assets: an open conditions record, and the standard it produces. Revenue: protocol licence from each operating company, plus certification from anyone claiming conformance.
Every negotiated permission leaves something behind. The question that kept going in circles was which of it we hold, and the answer is clearest when the assets are sorted by who holds them rather than how they came to exist. Four layers. The citizen holds the credentials. The commons holds the record and the grammar. We license the operating logic and hold the standard. The full argument sits in the position paper.
The record that this group met these conditions in this space. Issued as a credential the holder keeps in their own wallet and presents when they choose. Selective disclosure lets them prove a condition was met without revealing which event, when, or where.
Every tested condition attached to a permission: noise caps, hours, insurance thresholds, access duties, what was tried and what held.
Why a condition was set. Four kinds: what was weighed, what was feared, what was owed, and what was imagined.
The registry underneath the credentials: which issuers are trusted, what has been revoked, what schema each credential follows. It holds no personal records and produces no score.
The condition schema, the proof format, and the issuance and verification rules. The grammar anyone needs in order to take part.
Why the grammar has to be open. If the schema is ours, nobody can write to the record or verify a credential without our permission, and what we would have is a readable archive rather than a commons. Opening it costs us schema control and buys us the only thing that makes the mark worth having, which is adoption.
Risk routing, the negotiation method, and the rule review logic. How a request finds its rung, how objections become conditions, and how patterns become defaults.
The conformance criteria: what a process must do to count as a good permission decision, derived from thousands of real ones.
The visible sign that a permission was issued through a conforming process. What makes the standard legible to a citizen, an insurer or a court.
Analysis built on the open record: which conditions fail, where friction concentrates, where risk rules run disproportionate to the risk.
Value is relational: what something is worth to someone. Asset is structural: what you hold or control that generates future returns.
The conditions library has real value to planning authorities. Our position keeps it open rather than turning it into an asset through controlled access, because openness is what makes the pattern it produces credible.
The asset therefore sits one layer up. The civic standard, and the mark that proves conformance to it, are what DML KR holds and charges for. The record underneath stays common.
Airlines. Seat is the occasion, miles are the asset.
Michelin. Guide is the loss-leader, authority is the asset.
Gore-Tex. Membrane is the technology, the standard is the asset.
Stripe. Payment is the entry, dependency is the asset.
Civic Ledger. Permission is the occasion, the citizen keeps the credential, the open record builds the standard, and conformance to the standard is what earns.
From the WeSharing Korea operating architecture, 26 June 2026. Steps 1 to 6 are documented. Step 7 is the addition this round of work proposes.
Local governments in Incheon, Yongin and Jeonnam pay an annual subscription to the operating company. Target: three signed contracts by 31 December 2026.
Citizens and space users pay per transaction and by membership. Volume grows with city scale.
Living lab and policy data sold to governments, researchers and insurers. Inha University produces the knowledge layer.
Revenue flows out to tech module partners by volume: AI calls, DID credentials, payment transactions, maintenance.
The operating company pays DML KR for the protocol licence, permissioning engine, brand use and governance standard. This is DML KR's primary revenue.
Net operating surplus, rather than gross revenue, distributed to partners and investors after a 12-month contribution review. Equity invitation follows.
Proposed. Anyone claiming conformance pays, including city systems and vendors that never run the software. The only line that scales past our own deployments.
Five questions this research leaves standing. The first is partly answered by the architecture document. The rest are live.
Partly resolved. The architecture places core protocol IP with DML KR. The operating agreements still need to confirm whether conditions generated through city operation fall inside that, or sit with the city, or belong in the commons by default.
Korea is the first instance. The contractual mechanism obliging later instances to pay a licence fee to DML KR has to be designed now, ahead of each city being built.
The B2B data service depends on Inha producing policy intelligence from the living lab. Whether that output belongs to Inha, to the cities or to DML KR determines whether this revenue stream is achievable at all.
Contribution-based equity invitation after 12 months is a promising retention mechanism for tech module partners. Whether it holds London and Melbourne as contributing instances, rather than independent forks, remains untested.
London has freedom to structure as a trust or a socially progressive institution. Same rate, concessionary rate, or a different form of contribution back to the protocol: all three are open.
Four documents, one argument. This one shows where value concentrates. Read the position paper next, since it turns this into a licence design.
Four archetypes, airlines, Michelin, Gore-Tex and Stripe, and where Civic Ledger's assets sit against them.
What the platform should hold, what it should give away, and how the licence follows from that.
Entity diagrams for mySociety, Decidim and Library of Things, and the five-layer operating architecture.
The public evening on Tuesday 4 August: who is speaking, the running order, and the funding case.